Degraded for months, then the second disk quit twenty minutes into the rebuild — or the controller died and its configuration died with it. RAID data recovery is fixture work on this bench: arrays at 0, 1, 5, 6 and 10 out of servers, workstations and NAS boxes across York and the Science Park, imaged first and reconstructed virtually, with business-down cases worked at the front of the queue.
Every raid array job is diagnosed free. The quote turns up fixed, in writing, before a screwdriver is lifted.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Full pricing is on the data recovery cost page.
First job on any raid array is putting the symptoms against the fault — after twenty-odd years, these twenty-five account for nearly everything that comes through the door.
The first loss was budgeted for; the rebuild then finishes a tired second. Array recovery's defining catastrophe and our steadiest arrival.
Half-run rebuilds poison the parity they depended on. We chart the damage's reach from images before structure is touched.
Controllers take their configuration to the grave. Geometry is re-derived from the members directly — no replacement card, no vendor utilities.
Months-old data pushed into a live set tears the file system along the seam of disagreement. Unpicked at image level.
Fresh configuration on top of a live one. Interrupt the initialisation early enough and a surprising majority survives below.
A power event drops multiple members at a stroke. Each drive receives its own repair and image before any group arithmetic begins.
Whole banks 'die' together when chassis wiring is the true offender. Diagnosis precedes alarm here — it's usually cheaper, too.
The RAID mathematics checks out while the NTFS or ext4 above lies in pieces. Parser-level rebuilding brings it home.
Removed in error, recoverable at speed — while the blocks it described stay unwritten. Time is the only real enemy.
Flat cache batteries plus an outage leave the write-hole open and the two out of step. Reconciled from images, where disagreement costs nothing.
H710s and P420s expire still holding the definition. We lift the layout off the member drives and skip the replacement-card theatre.
The drive with dead heads goes to the hood first, then rejoins the imaging queue with its colleagues. Nothing advances without it.
Matched 7E8s in small-business sets wear at matched rates. Imaging in parallel outruns the second failure, which is the entire game.
mdadm superblocks and Storage Spaces metadata vanish with little provocation. Both rebuild from the raw members, piece by piece.
A member remapping sectors every day is failing in slow motion — and slow motion arrives eventually. Imaged in time, the whole set lives.
RAID 10 with both halves of one mirror down defeats the design on paper. Lab imaging often lifts one half far enough to close the stripe.
Automatic rebuild lands on a hot spare that idled for years and quietly decayed the entire time. Nothing unimaged earns trust here.
One optimistic click against stale metadata scrambles the set. The genuine layout is read back off the drives, which kept honest records.
Members with no error-recovery limits get ejected from arrays under load. Imaged on patient hardware, then the set is reassembled.
Hypervisor builds lose pool metadata to power cuts. We walk the transaction history backward from complete member images.
The scheduled consistency check is precisely the sustained load a marginal drive cannot carry. It fails punctually, mid-scan — image before the next one's due.
Medium errors collected during degraded running get stamped into parity as permanent scars. We chart the punctures from images and route around them.
Wrong sector format, refused membership — and forcing the issue multiplies the wreckage. At image level, sector sizes become negotiable.
HBA or expander firmware that half-applied sheds drives in weary clumps. We identify the hardware fault first; the data was never the problem.
RAID 0 across two modules for the benchmarks, no parity, one module dead. Each is recovered as an NVMe case, then the stripe is sewn from the images.
Before anyone theorises, every member drive is captured end to end, and the originals never spin inside an array again. RAID drive recovery starts from those images: member order, stripe size, rotation and parity offset deduced from the data itself, the volume stood up virtually on top, the file system walked from the assembly. Stale members in a RAID 5, double losses in a RAID 6, nested 10s, controllers with total amnesia — an ordinary week. And where the card itself has died, RAID drive data recovery needs no matching controller at all: the layout is rebuilt from the member images, not from the hardware that lost it.
The nastiest calls are the database ones: an SQL server whose array died mid-write, transaction logs straddling the failure, the business stood still behind it. RAID database crash recovery gets handled as its own discipline here — array rebuilt virtually first, then the database files repaired to a consistent state, priority tables leading, so the firm is trading again before the long tail finishes copying. Mind, three clicks finish off more arrays than any hardware fault: forcing an offline member back in, rebuilding onto a dying disk, and letting somebody try one last experiment. If the array is down — power off, label every drive with its bay, and pick up the phone.
One rule governs RAID at this workshop — image everything before touching anything — and it has never once been waived:
All members cloned simultaneously on dedicated hardware before theories are aired. Rebuild risk lands on the copies; the originals spectate.
From the images it settles order, stripe, rotation and offset, then stands the array up virtually. The geometry is demonstrated, never assumed.
A failed member is treated as a full hard-drive case in its own right — heads, firmware, boards — until it images beside the rest.
Parity and entropy testing confirm the solved layout before one file is lifted. Guesses do not get past this stage.
Native reads of NTFS, ReFS, ext4, XFS, BTRFS and VMFS — including the virtual disks parked on top of them.
Member imaging is physically read-only. What you posted is what returns, bit for bit.
Card, chipset or software layer — the geometry survives on the member drives themselves, and that is where we read it back from. PERCs and Smart Arrays die clutching their definitions; matched-batch NAS drives fail in choreography; desktop-grade members desert under sustained load. Three roads, one arrival ritual: every member imaged in parallel on day one, reconstruction on the copies, originals honourably retired.
Shut the server down before a single drive moves, then mark every member with its slot number on the way out — reconstruction leans hard on knowing that order. Ship the labelled drives alone; controller and chassis stay put, and a quick photo of the bays as found earns its keep later.
Nearly every job on our bench arrived by tracked, insured post — it's the quickest, safest route in. There's no collection service, so the parcel is yours to send or hand in.
Is the drive still inside a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Take the hard drive or SSD out first and post the bare drive on its own — removing drives from machines isn't a service we offer. Storage that's soldered to a motherboard (Apple Silicon Macs, certain slim laptops) is the one thing we can't work on: if it doesn't come out, it can't come in.
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Free diagnosis, a fixed written figure, no fix no fee on most work — start online or ring the freephone.